TELEPORTATION IN THE NEWS: DISTANCE EXPANDED, MICROBES TO BE TELEPORTED

One
of our favorite subjects here is the strange and weird, the stuff that
was yesterday's comic book fantasy and yesterday's science fiction, and
that arew quickly becoming today's science fact, and tomorrow's
commonplaces. Things like the quest for optical invisibility - by any
number of techniques - or Star Trek-like "transporters" and
"replicators" that beam people, atom-by-atom, from one point to a very
distant point at the speed of light, and then "reassemble" them. Or
things like teleportation. Of course, if one wants a Star Trek
like transporter, one will have to improve the distance over which one
can do such things, and, ultimately, try it out on organic life.Enter quantum teleportation, superposition, and ...well, see for yourself in these two articles shared by Mr. J,H, and Ms. M.W.:NIST Team Breaks Distance Record for Quantum TeleportationThis first experiment speaks for itself:

BOULDER, Colo.—Researchers at the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST) have “teleported” or transferred quantum
information carried in light particles over 100 kilometers (km) of
optical fiber, four times farther than the previous record.

The experiment confirmed that quantum communication is feasible
over long distances in fiber. Other research groups have teleported
quantum information over longer distances in free space, but the ability
to do so over conventional fiber-optic lines offers more flexibility
for network design.

Nott to be confused with Star Trek’s fictional “beaming
up” of people, quantum teleportation involves the transfer, or remote
reconstruction, of information encoded in quantum states of matter or
light. Teleportation is useful in both quantum communications and
quantum computing, which offer prospects for novel capabilities such as
unbreakable encryption and advanced code-breaking, respectively. The
basic method for quantum teleportation was first proposed more than 20
years ago and has been performed by a number of research groups,
including one at NIST using atoms in 2004.

The new record, described in Optica,* involved the
transfer of quantum information contained in one photon—its specific
time slot in a sequence—to another photon transmitted over 102 km of
spooled fiber in a NIST laboratory in Colorado.

What's interesting here is the clear implication of this
experiment: what has been advanced is not to much the teleportation
ability itself, but rather, the detector capability. Ponder it
for a moment: a detector has been invented which can pick out one photon
amid all the "quantum noise" created by information transfer over fiber
optic cables sixty miles in length. A few years ago, when I first
started blogging about the leaps and bounds that teleportation
experiments were achieving, and then pointed out the principal
difficulty of any Star Trek like transporter-reassembler: it would be required to detect massive amounts of data signal among even much more
massive amounts of "noise", and then reassemble the trillions of data
signals accurately. This, of course, would require an extremely accurate
"detector" (not to mention, massive computational capability). What
I'm suggesting here is that the NIST experiment is another step in that
technology tree, A long way off, to be sure, from Gene Roddenberry's
imagination, but a much larger step from where we were just a few months
ago.

Which brings us to the "can organic life go through this process,
and emerge unharmed" while it is, so to speak, in two places at once?
Or, to put it differently, does quantum entanglement work for life (and,
while you're pondering this idea and experiment, get out your
Wheeler and Everett thinking caps, and ponder their "multiverse"
interpretation of quantum mechanics too):

The researchers plan to build on the work of others at the University of Colorado who showed in 2013 that a tiny, vibrating aluminium membrane could be placed in a superposition of states.“We propose to simply put a small microbe on top of the aluminum
membrane. The microbe will also be in a superposition state when the
aluminum membrane is in a superposition state. The principle is quite
simple,” Dr Li said.The researchers plan to go one step further in a second
experiment that would entangle the position of the microbe with the spin
of an electron inside it. “The purpose of the second experiment is to
make the system useful. It can be used to detect defects of DNA and
proteins in a microbe, and image the microbe with single electron spin
sensitivity,” Dr Li said.Li said he hoped to conduct the experiment, but that leading
scientists in the field had laboratories better equipped to take the
project on, and that he hoped to collaborate with them. “If the top
group in quantum electromechanics want to focus on doing this
experiment, I think a microbe could be put into a superposition state in
three years,” he said. (Emphasis added)

Note that this experiment does "double duty", not only testing the
viability of quantum superposition on organic life, but also plans on
developing detection capabilities of a medical nature based upon the
spin characteristics of single electrons, or, to put it "country
simple," we've come a long way since Millikan, Stern, and Gerlach. The
ability to correlate such characteristics with, say, states of cellular
health or potential disease have obvious medical and diagnostic
implications, and implications, as well,for electromagnetic methods of healing and therapy,
and this time, it will be very difficult for Big Pharma to suppress
such ideas and techniques, as they successfully did with Royal Rife in
this country, and Priore in France. Indeed, it is even possible that in
the process of superposition of microbes, side effects will inevitablybe noticed that affect the organism's state of health.